for the bright rails and perhaps the interior of a droning
freight-car, now switching anew through the edge of odorous pine
woods, yet leaving behind him always a wary, broken trail.

The man was tall and strong, with hair that gleamed red in the
sun, and eyes of a reddish brown. He walked with the free swing
of a world wanderer, yet always his heart strained for a glimpse
of the Canadian border; for some hundreds of miles behind him lay
the Vermont marble quarries whose dust still faintly blanched his
clothes, and there, in a drunken flight, he had killed a man. He
did not know that in fleeing from justice he was rushing into the
arms of love; he did not even know that he was in the Ragged
Woods, with Twinkling Island just off the coast; he only studied
the tree bark and snuffed the breeze, and knew that the sea was
near. At length, well satisfied with the distance he had come
since dawn, he cleared a space among the pine cones, then lay
down, and, lulled by the ancient whisper of the wind in the
treetops, closed his eyes.

He was of the Ulysses breed, this man, a wanderer of the earth,
acquainted with many cities, one whose shipwrecks and misfortunes
had but whetted his love of life; and even while he slept, there
came upon him, as of old Nausicaa came upon Ulysses, a woman.
She, too, was straight and strong; her dark face was framed by a
blue-checked sunbonnet; she carried a large basket filled with
blackberries, and her lips as well as her hands were stained. She
saw the man lying in a shaft of the sunset, and started back,
then, tiptoeing past, bent forward slightly to examine his face.
In that lingering gaze a twig cracked beneath her foot. He sat up
instantly, tense, expectant; then for a silent space their eyes